Big Books and Social Movements

Explanations of the past both reflect and influence the way we think about the present and future. Like artists and politicians, social movements develop a “reputation” that includes a capsule history of a movement's origins, goals, and impact. Both popular narratives and scholarly treatments identify four books published in the early 1960s as having spurred important social movements and government action. This “big book myth” provides a simple origins story for social movements, a version of an “immaculate conception” notion of social change. We compare the mythic accounts of feminist, environmental, anti-poverty, and consumer movements of the 1960s to fuller histories of these movements and find consistent distortions in the common big book narratives. Mythic accounts shorten the incubation time of social movements and omit the initiating efforts of government and political organizations. The myths develop and persist because they allow interested actors to package and contain a movement's origins, explicitly suggesting that broad social dynamics replicate idealized individual conversion stories. They also allow actors to edit out complicated histories that could compromise the legitimacy of a movement or a set of policy reforms. These mythic accounts spread and persist because they simplify complicated social processes and offer analogues to the individual process of becoming active, but they may lead us to misunderstand the past and make misjudgments about collective action and social change in the future. We consider those implications and call for more research on the construction of myths about the past.